Driving to See The Snow

Once upon a time, a long long time ago, (1967) in a land far far away (from here), there were two little girls who lived on the beach and had never seen snow. One day, they looked up from their sunny patio toward the Sierra Madres behind their house and saw that the tip tops were white. "Mommy," they said, "why are the mountains all dusty?" Their mother, who had spent most of her life on the west coast also, told them about a magical substance that once in a while came down from the clouds called snow. The girls were very excited and begged their mother to let them go see this wonderous sight. Their mother bundled them up in their warmest plastic rain galoshes, and knee high socks, piled them into the Chevy station wagon, along with the camera and a 1.5 pound bag of rock salt she bought for making ice cream (because she'd heard you needed to salt the roads if they were icy), and drove them 35 minutes up the pass to the frigid snowline, where minutes earlier a torrent of snow had left giant drifts of up to an inch in places. The girls begged to get out of the car to make snowmen and snow angels like they'd seen in foreign travelogs, but their mother kept driving. Past the Jeeps, and Pickup trucks that had brought their own rambunctious children to experience this rare delight. Their mother wanted to find a private patch of pristine snow so she could record this moment for the family album, which was otherwise filled with sandy, splashy, shorts clad people. Finally, as the sun sank low in the sky and the temperature dropped to a frigid 45 degrees, their mother told the girls they could get out of the car and stand under that pine tree - 'be careful not to mess up the snow before I take this snapshot!' Once the picture was taken, the girls piled handfulls of the white stuff together, but dirt and leaves mixed in, and it didn't stick together, and they didn't have mittens, just some old white sunday school gloves that were instantly soaked. They lay down in the snow and waved their arms and legs, but they just ended up sweeping the snow off of the dirt and rocks underneath, giving their snow angels a sadly tarnished look. After 5 long minutes of frolicking, the girls were wet and cold and tired and ready to go home. Once safely back to sea-level, the girls ran shivvering into the house, ready for some hot chocolate! The End.